Director Lucy Bailey and designer William Dudley have taken a refreshingly radical approach to this self-consciously traditional space, covering the Globe's open yard with a vast net through which actors swoop and dive on the hapless hero like vultures. Visually, the effect is striking. The result, however, is to shift attention away from Timon's complex psyche towards his parasitic chums and plummeting creditors.

Bailey makes some good points. Timon, an Athenian nobleman and compulsive giver, is clearly at the centre of a homosocial world. His exclusively male set indulge in rugger-bugger orgies and treat women as no more than whores with whom to dive under the table. Even the famous scene where Timon, strapped for cash, invites his false friends to a banquet of warm water and stones is initially seen as just another of his practical jokes. And the aerial figures who descend on Timon as if he were a piece of rotting carrion evoke the nightmarish worlds of Bosch and Breughel.

The difficulty lies with Timon himself and his transformation from a neurotic spendthrift to a Beckettian misanthrope. Simon Paisley Day, who enters showering the Globe audience with gold, is perfectly plausible in the first half, implying that Timon's profligacy is a sexual surrogate. But, though he strips to his underpants and even has a dump to prove the kinship between gold and excrement, he never conveys the wild extremities of Timon's despair. When he launches into his great tirade urging that "peace, justice, truth, domestic awe, night-rest and neighbourhood" come to confusion, he seems to be ticking off the appropriate boxes rather than expressing an embittered Lear-like vision.

There is good work from Bo Paraj as the cynical Apemantus and Gary Oliver as Alcibiades. Patrick Godfrey conveys the silvery decency of Timon's loyal steward, Flavius, who fulfils the role of Alistair Darling to his master's Gordon Brown.

But because the production places so much emphasis on the hero's cawing, brooding, bird-like tormentors, Timon seems more a victim of external circumstance than of his own psychological hangups. For all the visual bravura, I can't help feeling that this most pessimistic and problematic of plays is better suited to intimate studio theatres than to an aggressively social space like Shakespeare's Globe.